Around 1932, Nay wanted to trace the cosmic connections between man and nature in his art — he himself spoke of a "mythical bond" — behind the outward appearance of things.The beginning was made by some abstracted animal paintings, in which he sought, for example, to connect a cow, a calf or an elk's head with their natural environment through a net-like system of planes and lines. When he encountered the original life of the fishermen at the Baltic Sea around 1935, man increasingly moved into the center of his art.

Nay expressed his involvement in the dynamics of heaven and earth, of storm and sea, with the powerful rhythm of the colors. The importance of the colors for his painting grew more and more — only the forms emerged from them. As early as 1930, during a stay on Bornholm in the fishing village of Tejn, the archaic nature of life by the sea — the interweaving of sky, ocean, earth and man on a universal level — may have flashed up in his mind as a solution.

The support of the Lübeck museum director Carl Georg Heise and the painter Edvard Munch enabled him to make his first trip to the Norwegian Lofoten Islands in 1937. Here Nay experienced more than ever the intertwining of man with nature. In his paintings, he simplified his figure almost to a sign made of color: it merges with the crystalline forms of the rocky surroundings and grows together with them to form a great whole.

In December 1939 Nay began his military service. Stationed as a soldier first in Schwerin (an der Warthe) and then in southern France, he was rarely able to work artistically; Only from 1942 in Le Mans did he gain more freedom.

He established German and French contacts, also with the art friend Pierre Térouanne. He left his studio to him and provided him with painting materials: the works created here — an enchanted garden, a communal apple harvest, or a united family — at first seem disturbingly idyllic, but in their fragility of crystalline-looking formal language and flashing color contrasts they always carry the transience of this paradise, which is nevertheless only superficial.

Released from the army in May 1945, Nay retreated to Hofheim am Taunus, where his friend Hanna Bekker vom Rath found him a studio house. He now applied the colors thickly and with moving brushstrokes, thus giving his depictions great liveliness.

He found inspiration for this in the Bible and in the myths of Greek antiquity. In the mysterious Hekate paintings (named after the goddess of magic) he depicted situations of transformation as well as an idyllic existence in nature. The quiet Hofheim, where Nay was extraordinarily productive for six years until 1951, after the horrors of the war the ideal place: "I have the whole cottage for myself, it is located above the small town with a wide view over the Maine plain to the Odenwald," he wrote to a friend. And further: "You will say, there may still be something like [a] paradise there."

Nay found inspiration in the fugue, a form of musical composition in which different voices are offset in time, yet sound together: By looping, repeating, or reversing areas of color, he created dynamic bands and rhythmic sweeps in his paintings. They often circle around black dots and visually create movement. The content of the picture can hardly be grasped, and yet last memories of figures are present.

In 1951 Nay moved to Cologne. The liveliness of the big city was reflected in the "Rhythmic Pictures," his first completely abstract works.

The interplay of form, line and color now appeared freer, even more dynamic - inspired by works of New Music. At times the previously strict contours became blurred and frayed, which in effect - for example in pictures like "Glanz vom grünen Feuer" or "Orange merkurisch" — almost amounted to an all-over, but Nay soon returned to a more planned methodology.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay, 1952

In the fall of 1953, he also took on a three-month teaching position at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg: While the painter had initially only formulated principles of working for himself, he now based his teaching on these. In 1955, his art-theoretical work "Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe" (On the value of color as a form) was published.

With the "Hekate Pictures" Ernst Wilhelm Nay had laid an important foundation for his further work. But only a few years later he reconsidered his pictorial means. In the "Fugal Paintings", which he began to create in 1949, the small-scale, dense and impasto painting was now more generous, more contoured and gained in two-dimensionality.

All sciences fascinated Nay, especially mathematics and physics. Albert Einstein
had proven that space, time and matter were not fixed but variable quantities. There was now no longer a single, correct view of the world, but many possible points of view. In addition, Nay also wanted to depict spatial relationships, and in the process he discovered for himself the motif of the disc.

In the 1950s, he created numerous images reminiscent of outer space from superimposed discs. Contrasts of dark-light or warm-cold colors set them optically in vibration. They seemed to swirl, dissolve, or push beyond the edges. Nay laid hatchings and pointed ovals over his circles and in 1963/64 developed paintings in which huge eyes seem like magical signs. Three of these works were placed on the ceiling at "documenta III" in Kassel in 1964, sparking a major discussion about the general content of his works.

Today there is no question that although many of Nay's paintings appear to be non-objective, he has always included man and his position in the universe in his multi-layered art.From 1965 onwards, Nay simplified his painting even more: from a few intensive colors and he developed pictures with mostly vertically running elements. They, too, seem free of objects at first, but are not infrequently reminiscent of bodies, limbs, hands, or eyes.

Until the end, Nay kept his art in the balance between figure and abstraction.